Black box recovered from Air India plane-crash site

MANGALORE, India - As crash investigators pulled the black box from the charred, twisted wreckage of an Air India plane Sunday, Koolikkunnu Krishnan marveled that he escaped the crash alive.

Of the 166 passengers and crew aboard when the plane overshot a hilltop runway and plunged over a cliff at dawn Saturday, 158 were dead. Krishnan and just seven others survived.

"I've been thinking, Why me? Why me?' And I can only think that God wanted to give me a second life," he said from his hospital bed in Mangalore.

Investigators and aviation officials combed through the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 strewn across a hillside to try to determine the cause of India's worst air disaster in more than a decade. They recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight-data recorder, which they hope will give them important clues, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

A U.S. forensic team also arrived in India to help in the investigation, said Harpreet Singh, an Air India spokeswoman.

By Sunday evening, 146 of the 158 bodies had been identified and were being handed to grieving relatives for burial, said Arvind Jadhav, Air India's chairman and managing director.

The cause of the crash was not clear and government officials declined to speak about the status of the investigation or any possible causes of the crash. The black box would be sent to New Delhi today for decoding and further investigation, they said.